A Project to Improve Secondary Social Studies Instruction: An Overview of Critical Thinking Skills (Introduction to Social Inquiry, Ethical Development, & Civic Competence).

Fink, Joel

The secondary social studies lessons in this publication are intended to help teachers improve instruction. Lessons are provided for the curriculum areas of social inquiry, ethical development, and civic competence. In the social inquiry lessons, students learn to describe and explain human behavior. In the ethical development lessons, students reason about what is morally right or wrong for an individual person to do. The concern of the civic competence lessons is with the formulation of a policy and law for the society as a whole. For each curriculum area there is an introduction, sample topics and focus questions, and an explanation of the thinking skills emphasized in the lessons. For each thinking skill, there are exercises for practice. Formulating and testing hypotheses are the major critical-thinking skills taught in the social inquiry lessons. The critical-thinking skills taught in the ethical development and civic competence lessons are giving reasons for value positions taken, identifying factual claims being made in arguments, raising questions about the truth of factual claims, identifying undesirable consequences of policy positions, identifying value claims, raising conflicting values, and raising questions of consistency. The lessons are self-contained. Some examples follow. A hypothesis is presented followed by data. Students must decide whether the data support the hypothesis. In another exercise, students are given value positions (e.g., the use of marijuana should be legalized) and asked to write at least one reason to support the position. (Author/RM)